On the Roman Mass, Don’t Take Your Cue from Fortescue

Separated by over 100 years, with the advantage going to Fiedrowicz

This article is a combined effort of Gregory’s and mine. - PAK

Undoubtedly Adrian Fortescue is a fascinating figure, rather eccentric in some ways (see Aidan Nichols’ biography) – a biting critic of Pius X, e.g., whom he called “an Italian lunatic” – but it must be borne in mind that his liturgical scholarship is somewhat out of date, and actually wrong in certain respects. It is thus a source of near daily frustration to find well-intentioned people online citing his book The Mass: A Study of the Roman Liturgy from 1912 as if it were the final word on the topic, when in fact there are much better resources that have appeared in the last 114 (!) years.

The internet promised to give everyone access to all information, but interestingly, I have noticed that it actually tends in a different direction: it encourages access to what is old because it’s in the public domain, and thus promotes an odd kind of time-trapped referentiality, at least in areas where genuine progress has occurred. Recent books are copyrighted and have to be bought and studied; they can’t be downloaded and searched quite as readily, so they are neglected or not even recognized. Our cutting-edge technology has, in fact, made us lazy regurgitators of low-hanging information.
 

Image courtesy of Corpus Christi Watershed

Fortescue’s gravest error – and the one that would cause the greatest mischief later – is an assumption he shares with many other scholars of his time: namely, that the “original” text and order of the Roman Canon was wildly disturbed over the course of time by any number of omissions, transpositions, rewrites, etc. deliberate or accidental. This simply flies in the face of everything that is attested in all the ancient manuscripts of the Canon, which are astonishingly consistent from one to another, and fundamentally very similar to what we find in the Gelasian Sacramentary, and thenceforth in all pertinent liturgical books of the Roman Rite.

Behind that lies the equally false and equally pernicious assumption that in ancient times, the various major churches (not just Rome) routinely trashed their older, and hence “more authentic” tradition in favor of novelties, feeding into the narrative that this is a routine occurrence and a normal procedure. It is certainly not.

Then, we have the problem that scholars assumed that X, Y, or Z thing which is attested in all the pertinent liturgical books as far back as we have them nevertheless does not represent the “original” (and hence “more authentic”) tradition. They will then be only too delighted to reconstruct that “original” and hence “more authentic” tradition on the basis of various theories. So, e.g., since the Eastern rites make a great deal of the pneumatic epiclesis, but the Roman Rite doesn’t have one, the Roman Rite must “originally” have had one and somehow lost it at some point.

(The late, great, and much-missed Fr John Hunwicke wrote a fine series on that specific topic; you can find all the links in “Reforming the Canon of the Mass: Some Considerations from Fr Hunwicke.”)

In a similar vein, we have the assumption that the Roman Mass must have had two readings before the Gospel, because some of the Eastern rites do (that is false, and there is no evidence for it), and similar extrapolations from the false premise that all rites are descended from a single early and primitive rite; therefore, what one has and another doesn’t must have “fallen out of” the other.

So the whole section in Fortescue on the “liturgical uniformity” of the first three centuries basically needs to be torn out and discarded; it is the opposite of the truth. The historical trajectory is that liturgies begin very varied and diverse, and over time, gradually assimilate to the forms of the nearest dominant see.

He accepts the error, very common in his time, that the Leonine Sacramentary is a sacramentary. It isn’t; it’s a private compilation of libelli Missarum, the Masses composed by the priests of the churches of Rome. Basically, everything they thought they knew about the so-called Apostolic Constitutions in the early twentieth century is wrong.

St. Hippolytus

Anything he says anywhere about “Hippolytus” has to be dismissed if he says it in reference to Rome. The whole Hippolytus construct completely collapsed when Margarita Guarducci presented a key piece of evidence at a conference held in Rome in 1974 that demonstrated the falsity of everything patristic scholars had built up over him before then. Even a figure as progressivist as Fr. John Baldovin candidly admits that there is nothing to the Hippolytus legend on the basis of which the Second Eucharistic Prayer was cobbled together.

When it comes to evidence drawn from the Fathers, one has to check and see if the sermon that is being quoted is authentic. This is an especially big problem with St. Augustine. If a sermon of his witnesses to a particular reading in the Mozarabic liturgy, one needs to check if the sermon was actually written by him, or passed off under his name after that reading had been fixed in the Mozarabic tradition.

Having said all this, I am not arguing that Fortescue’s book on the liturgy is without value; I am simply saying that one must consult more recent and better studies, such as Fr. Uwe Michael Lang’s 2022 book from Cambridge University Press, The Roman Mass: From Early Christian Origins to Tridentine Reform, which covers in superb academic detail all that is known about the development of the Roman rite from antiquity to the Tridentine reform (i.e., AD 33 to 1570). (The original hardcover was very pricey but a paperback edition has finally come out.) Fr. Lang also published A Short History of the Roman Mass in 2024. These works, in their own quiet way, do more to sweep away the misconceptions held by modern liturgical reformers than Fortescue, who never lived to see the awful things done by liturgists after him.

A very accessible one-volume work that accomplishes less in historical detail than Lang, but more in terms of an overall assessment of the “rightness” of the traditional Roman Rite against its attempted replacement, is Patristic scholar Dr. Michael Fiedrowicz’s The Traditional Mass: History, Form, and Theology of the Classical Roman Rite, published in English translation in 2020 by Angelico Press. This is the book I always recommend to people who are looking for a scholarly introduction.

(It bears mentioning that Fortescue’s book The Orthodox Eastern Church, which has been reprinted in a newly typeset edition, remains one of the finest historical, patristic, and ecclesiological investigations of the vexed relationship between Eastern and Western Christianity, and has much to contribute to the newly volcanic apologetics world that has sprouted up online. Unlike his book on the Roman Mass, The Orthodox Eastern Church is out of date only in a charming way, namely, its description of the early 20th-century Orthodox churches, countries, and peoples, which have changed a lot since then.)

An Interview with Fr Uwe Michael Lang on Liturgy

I am sure that our readers will enjoy this interview with the liturgical scholar Fr Uwe Michael Lang of the London Oratory, which was recently published on the YouTube channel of the Totus Tuus Apostolate. It covers a wide range of subjects: Pope Benedict’s teaching on the liturgy, the liturgical abuses in the post-Conciliar period and our own time, some of the historical problems behind the creation of the reform, the use of Latin in the liturgy, etc.

In addition to his other scholarly work, Fr Lang has recently published two very useful volumes on the history of the Roman Rite. The more recent one, A Short History of the Roman Mass (Ignatius Press, 2024), a survey of the fixed parts of the Roman Rite (Canon, Offertory prayers, etc.) is an abbreviation of his 2022 volume The Roman Mass: From Early Christian Origins to Tridentine Reform (Cambridge University Press, 2022). He currently lectures at St Mary’s University and Allen Hall Seminary in London, and serves inter alia as an editor of the liturgical journal Antiphon. From 2008 to 2012, he was a staff member of the Congregation for Divine Worship, and from 2008 to 2013, was a consultor to the Office for the Liturgical Celebrations of the Supreme Pontiff.

Announcing Several Excellent New Books and Reprints

I have been remiss in reviewing good books sent to me by publishers. In fact, I am remiss even in announcing books that I have reprinted myself! So I will take some time now to recommend these works to NLM readers.

Ludwig Ott. Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma. Trans. Patrick Lynch. Ed. James Canon Bastible. Revised and updated by Robert Fastiggi. N.p.: Baronius Press, 2018. Hardcover, with gold ribbon, 568 + xxii pp. $59.95.

I shall begin with what is certainly one of the most impressive books to appear in a long time, and something that should be on everyone's shelf: a beautifully printed new edition of the classic Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma by Ludwig Ott, published by Baronius Press with the same exceptional quality that we have come to expect from all of their books.

Many will already be familiar with this brilliant summary of dogmatic theology, first published in 1952. It has a special place in my heart because it was the first book of serious theology ever placed into my hands in high school, at a time when I was awakening to my Catholic faith for the first time, and looking for meaty explanations, which I had never heard or seen in 16+ years of mainstream Catholicism. A teacher put me on to Ott, and I was riveted to it. I even prepared handouts from it for my youth group, not realizing that the text and the audience did not quite match up. But enough of reminiscing. The point is that Ott is the best comprehensive guide to Catholic dogma ever produced, laying out the Scriptural, patristic, liturgical, and magisterial sources of each Catholic doctrine, and indicating the level of authority attaching to it. This latter feature is particularly helpful, in that one can quickly see whether a teaching is de fide or is held with a greater or less certitude by the Church.

An indication of the usefulness, completeness, and reliability of Ott is the fact that the monastery of Le Barroux (and perhaps others, too, unbeknownst to me) has all of its monks studying for the priesthood read Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma in its entirety, chapter by chapter, as they proceed through their program of formation. Really, any Catholic who wants to know the actual content of the Catholic Faith, as well as which doctrines are matters of opinion or dispute (and to what degree), should consult Ott on a regular basis.

The original English translation of Ott by Dr Patrick Lynch, while it helped countless readers, was afflicted with numerous errors of translation. There has been an "errata sheet" floating around for a long time. The Baronius edition has been compared page for page to the definitive German edition (Bonn: nova & vetera, 2010) and corrected in hundreds of details by Dr Robert Fastiggi. The formatting is cleaner and easier to follow, and of course, being newly typeset and printed in hardcover with a sewn binding, is much nicer on the eyes and much more durable than the old TAN glued paperbacks that would split if you just looked at them too intently.

This edition features an eloquent little foreword by Bishop Athanasius Schneider and a preface by Dr Fastiggi giving examples of how the translation has been improved.

I simply cannot recommend this book and this new edition of it highly enough. If you do not have Ott, wait not a moment longer. If you already have an old Ott, replace it with the new Ott, which is handsomer and better translated. To order, visit its Baronius Press page.

Uwe Michael Lang, ed. Authentic Liturgical Renewal in Contemporary Perspective. Proceedings of the Sacra Liturgia Conference, London, 5-8  July 2016. London/New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2017. Paper, xii + 197 pp. $26.95.

I'm not sure why it is the case that this third Sacra Liturgia volume has been somewhat neglected or even forgotten in the world of liturgical studies and renewal. One might speculate that after two substantial volumes of Sacra Liturgia proceedings (both of which have been reviewed at NLM: the first here, the second here), there may be a market saturation phenomenon; but I think that this is not true, or at least not the main explanation. I believe that people are just not aware of this book and how valuable its contents are, and that the general ecclesial mayhem swirling around us, with seems to worsen with each passing year or even each passing month, is not a congenial atmosphere for the study of scholarly literature.

Yet this third volume is no less worthy than its predecessors of our careful attention. The book includes, needless to say, the definitive edition of Cardinal Sarah's plenary lecture in which he made his now-controversial recommendation that priests should begin celebrating the Ordinary Form ad orientem in Advent. This was not the first time the Cardinal had made this proposal, but it was the first time that he attracted the notice of hostile powers in high places. But the other papers in the volume, less notorious, are more intriguing: for example, Dom Charbel Pazat de Lys on "The Public Nature of Catholic Liturgy"; Stephen Bullivant on how confusion about the evangelistic needs of modern man not only dictated the liturgical reform but now require its reversal; Fr Uwe Michael Lang's precise and detailed account of the Tridentine liturgical reform, which nicely complements the study of the same subject by Anthony Chadwick in the T&T Clark Companion to Liturgy; and Alcuin Reid's fascinating account of the conciliar debate over what became article 50 of Sacrosanctum Concilium, namely, the demand that the Order of Mass be revised.

In short, if you have benefited from the earlier volumes, you will undoubtedly benefit from this one as well. The series, which I hope will soon be joined by a fourth containing the proceedings from Sacra Liturgia in Milan, truly sets a benchmark for current liturgical studies, which are submitting decades of ruling assumptions to penetrating critique and contributing to the recovery of lost elements of Catholic tradition.

Emile Mersch, S.J. The Whole Christ. The Historical Development of the Doctrine of the Mystical Body in Scripture and Tradition. Trans. John R. Kelly. First published 1938. N.p.: Ex Fontibus Company, 2018. Paperback, xvi + 623 pp. $21.77.

Emile Mersch was once among the most appreciated theologians, especially in regard to ecclesiology. Then the Second Vatican Council hit, and someone who is customarily depicted with cloven hoofs and a pointed tail pressed the "delete" button. Today, vast swaths of magnificent preconciliar theological work is totally forgotten. It would be more accurate to speak of "the Chernobyl" than of "the Council."

Happily, this is beginning to change as some of the old classics are rediscovered and reprinted. Ex Fontibus has played a vital role in this process, as one can see from consulting their now-extensive catalogue. The latest addition is Mersch's extraordinarily rich and illuminating study of the concept and reality of the Church as Mystical Body of Christ, as it was prefigured in the Old Testament, clearly shown forth in the New Testament (he has many chapters on St. Paul and St. John), powerfully proclaimed by the Greek Fathers (chapters on St Ignatius of Antioch, St Irenaeus, St Athanasius, St Hilary of Poitiers, St Gregory Nazianzen and St Gregory of Nyssa, St John Chrysostom, and St Cyril of Alexandria), and fully articulated in the Western tradition (chapters on Tertullian, St Cyprian, St Augustine, the early Middle Ages, the Scholastics, and the French school).

When I taught ecclesiology at the International Theological Institute, I always assigned the chapters on St Cyril of Alexandria and St Augustine out of this book, as there is no better synthesis of their theology of the Church. In general, I would place it in the top ten books on ecclesiology for any serious reader's shelf. The quality of the reprint is fine.

The last two books featured today are reprinted under my own reprint service, Os Justi Press. I do not yet have a website, but posts about other titles may be found here, here, here, and here.

Pius Parsch, The Breviary Explained. Trans. William Nayden and Carl Hoegerl. First published in 1952 by Herder in St. Louis. Reprinted by Os Justi Press, 2018. Paperback, viii + 459 pp. $19.95.

Does Pius Parsch require any introduction? Although one can see occasional touches of pastoralism and antiquarianism in his work, Parsch was in fact one of the finest writers of the original Liturgical Movement and his commentaries on the Mass and the Divine Office always make for worthwhile reading. His insights are copious and his style sparkles with his strong love of the Church's daily round of public worship.

This book is a particular masterpiece, and it surprises me greatly that it has been out of print for so long. The contents spell out the scope of the work: Fundamental Notions (e.g., Why pray the breviary?); The Constituent Parts (psalms, lessons, orations, verse and versicle, antiphons, responsory, hymns); The Spirit of the Breviary (structure, cursus, seasonal variations). It is, in fact, a compendious introduction to the Roman Breviary in Pius X's revision, and will immensely enhance the understanding and devotion of anyone, cleric or layman, who uses this edition of the breviary, which would be the vast majority of members of the traditionalist movement.

Anthology of Catholic Poets: 200 Years of Catholic Poetry in English. Compiled by Joyce Kilmer. First published in 1917; last edition 1939. Reprinted by Os Justi Press, 2018. Paperback, xxx + 389 pp. $19.95.

It has always been my intention to bring this fine anthology by Joyce Kilmer back into print, alongside a similar sort of volume (also from 1939) by Thomas Walsh, The Catholic Anthology: The World's Great Catholic Poetry. The difference is simply that Walsh's much larger book contains translations from all major languages and spans many more centuries, while Kilmer's focuses on English poets only, from the start of the 18th century onwards. As one would expect, it includes selections from such literary lights as Belloc, Benson, Faber, Hopkins, Lionel Johnson, Maynard, Meynell, Newman, Patmore, Thompson, and Wilde.

Sacra Liturgia UK: Day 4

The final day of Sacra Liturgia UK began with Prof. Helmut Hoping's paper on one of the most fundamental aspects of our liturgy, Liturgy and the Triune God: Rethinking Trinitarian Theology. Prof. Hoping started with the observation that the liturgy is prima theologia, the primary locus of theology, in which we first speak to God rather than about God. The subject of theology is the mystery of God in his revelation to us as Trinity, and this is a fundamental part of liturgical prayer.

Prof. Hoping then explored what the New Testament has to say about the Trinity, touching on how Jesus prayed, the importance of the shema (Mk. 12:29-31; cf. Dt. 6:4-9), Christ as High Priest and heavenly liturgist in the book of Hebrews, and the sacrificial Lamb in the book of Revelation. He noted that the Roman Rite shows a patrocentric character, in which prayer is prayed in a trinitarian manner - ad Patrem per Christum in unitate Spiritus sancti. As the Holy Spirit reveals to us the intimacy of the personal relationship between the Father and the Son, so too the liturgy allows the individual Christian to enter into the I-Thou relationship through trinitarian prayer and sacramental Communion. In short, the trinitarian foundation of the liturgy and Christian life is absolutely indispensable to our entire being, as well as our relationship to God and to one another as Catholics.

Fr Michael Cullinan then gave us a slightly different perspective as a moral theologian in his paper The Ethical Character of the Mysteries: Observations from a Moral Theologian. His central thesis was that what people see and hear in our churches through the liturgy has grave moral importance for their lives. However, instead of applying moral principles to the liturgy, as often done in times gone by, he asked how can we derive moral principles from the liturgy?

As well as the moral-theological perspective, Fr Cullinan gave an ecumenical perspective by mediating his reflections through theologians from the Eastern Churches and Protestant sources, such as Christos Yannaras, Vigen Guroian, John Zizioulas, Paul Ramsey, and Oliver O’Donovan. Among other insights, he pointed out that:

Historically, certainly since the late Middle Ages we in the West minimised sacraments to their essential requirements for validity, we simplified and individualised liturgy to allow individual low Masses, and then all too often we regarded the whole world of art, music and architecture as mere icing on the cake: delicious and sweet but not particularly nourishing or essential. So we have to convince ourselves that what people see and hear at Mass is important to their moral lives.

A particularly astute, moral observation was also made by Fr Cullinan regarding the minimalist celebrations of the liturgy common in many rich, Western nations, which have simplicity without nobility (cf. SC 34):

For the first time in religious history people do not seem to want to offer to God the best they have and they do not see anything wrong in this. Often it is the people who have most, perhaps far more than their parents and grandparents, who want the barest worship spaces. Whereas it is often the poorest who want to subscribe to statues and richly ornamented vestments. The moral theologian should suspect that something may be going on here, to do with both psychology and sociology.

Fr Cullinan concluded with the question that, if what happens in our parish liturgies does not present the challenge and glory of the Christian life to people, if it fails to communicate the fullness of the Gospel, how then shall they be saved? He provided much food for thought regarding the moral implications of contemporary liturgical practice, which also has ramifications for the effectiveness of the post-Vatican II liturgical reforms.

The next paper was given by Prof. David Fagerberg on Doing the World Liturgically: Stewardship of Creation and Care for the Poor. I would not be the first person to observe that, in the contemporary Church, the very mention of the phrase "social justice" causes many eyes to roll and cynicism to rear its head. However, Prof. Fagerberg's contention that liturgy ought to be concerned with social justice, specifically stewardship for the environment and care for the poor was very challenging.

The narthex, he said, can be seen as a permeable membrane between the sacred and secular, and liturgy should overflow from the sanctuary:

Liturgy is our perfection, for there we are being filled with the love of God by joining the choreography of his divine love, and performing the work of a cosmic priesthood.

Prof. Fagerberg pointed out that one way of defining liturgy is to understand it as a restored participation in the original created order. A failure to understand this quickly ends in a negation of the shema; either the signs of creation no longer point to the Creator, with nature quickly becoming opaque, then a substitute, and finally an idol; or our neighbour is no longer seen as a fellow image of God, with the consequence that he quickly becomes a competitor, then an opponent, and finally an enemy.

The problem, Prof. Fagerberg said, is not with the world per se, but with our reception and interpretation of it. Money, sex and beer are not problematic, but avarice, lust and greed are. Due to the fall, our passions get in the way of a right relationship with the world, and thus also with God. The liturgy and the sacraments fortify us and equip us for a participatio actuosa in the world, to enable us to do the world as it was meant to be done - liturgically.

The fourth talk was given by Mgr Andrew Burnham, on Divine Worship: The Missal and "the liturgical books proper to the Anglican Tradition" (Anglicanorum Coetibus, III). Mgr Burnham took us through the history of Anglican-Catholic ecumenical dialogue, including the USCCB's "pastoral provision" of 1980 and the 2003 Book of Divine Worship, culminating in the recent liturgical books of the Ordinariate.

He talked about the work of the Anglicanae Traditiones commission and the CDWDS, and the sources used by them, including the influence of the Episcopalian (USA) 1928 BCP on the Ordinariate Missal. Mgr Burnham mentioned that this American influence has meant that many UK Ordinariate groups have experienced somewhat of a rupture in their worship due to the different Anglican liturgical contexts in the UK and USA. Certain features of Divine Worship: The Missal as compared to the usus recentior were discussed, such as the offertory prayers of the usus antiquior being the default for the Ordinariate (with the Pauline Missal's offertory available as an option). Mgr Burnham expressed the hope, shared by many at the conference, that the Ordinariate's liturgy will influence the next typical edition of the Missale Romanum, and that the barriers as to who can use which book will begin to fall (i.e. that non-Ordinariate priests will be able to use Divine Worship).

Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone then offered some concluding reflections, summing up the talks and liturgies of the conference. He urged patience with regard to the upcoming work of the CDWDS regarding the question of the reform of the reform, but said that the celebration of the Mass ad orientem in the usus recentior would go a long way towards preparing the way for it, and reiterated Cardinal Sarah's appeal to priests to begin celebrating Mass eastwards from the 1st Sunday of Advent this year. He encouraged all present to pay attention to the details of the liturgy in the celebration of it, holding up the London Oratory as an model and exemplar. Rubricism is a danger, as we are fallen human beings, but so is laxity and negligence. The Archbishop was keen to stress that there is a proper place for attention to detail in the liturgy, for people pay close attention to the things and people that they love dearly, and worship of Almighty God is central to who we are both collectively as the Body of Christ and individually as members of it.

Finally, Bishop Dominique Rey announced that the next Sacra Liturgia conference will be held in Milan at the University of the Sacred Heart from June 6th-9th, 2017. The conference will be in English and Italian, with all the presentations being translated. More details will be announced after the summer.

The conference ended with Solemn Mass according to Divine Worship: The Missal, celebrated by the ordinary of the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham, Mgr Keith Newton.

A huge thank you goes to Bishop Dominique Rey, Dom Alcuin Reid, Fr Uwe Michael Lang and everyone else who had a hand in organising Sacra Liturgia UK. It was lovely to meet so many people who are passionate about the worship of the Church at a very informative and illuminating conference, with wonderful, devout and prayerful celebrations of the sacred liturgy. Deo gratias!

(More photos and extracts from all the talks over the four days can be found at the Sacra Liturgia Facebook page. Apologies for the slight delay in this final account of the conference!)

Sacra Liturgia UK: Day 3

The third day of Sacra Liturgia UK began with an interesting talk by Dr Clare Hornsby, The Council of Florence of 1439: Diplomacy, Theology and the Arts in Early Renaissance Italy.

Dr Hornsby's paper was more historical than liturgical, but speaking from the perspective of someone who perhaps does not know as much as he ought to about the Council of Florence, it was very interesting. She guided the participants through the art, music and architecture of Florence in the 15th century, looking at the impact that the Council had on the city. The impression of the Eastern bishops when they came to Florence for the Council lasted for several decades afterwards, in the art, architecture and music we can still see and hear today, as did the declaration of unity between East and West (Laetentur Caeli) and the liturgical celebrations that accompanied it. It is unfortunate that the fall of Constantinople in 1453 meant that this declaration did not bear lasting fruit.

Fr Uwe Michael Lang was next to speak, with a paper entitled The Tridentine Liturgical Reform in Historical Perspective. He began with a contextualisation of the liturgical reforms that followed the Council of Trent, noting the importance of doing this:

I hope [to] provide a useful corrective to a powerful strand of liturgical scholarship, which understands itself as a highly specialised discipline with a proper methodology that at times appears set apart from the general trends of theological and historical research... Scholars who submerge themselves in the study of liturgy too often tend to ignore the context in which the liturgy evolved, as if liturgical texts were produced in a political and cultural vacuum.

The rise of nationalism, the nation state and colonialism, along with the humanist renaissance and the renewed interest in the Church Fathers (especially the Greek Fathers) are all important to bear in mind when speaking about the Tridentine reforms. The rapid expansion of the Franciscan order from the 13th century onward also propelled the move towards the standardisation of liturgical books, as the mendicant nature of Franciscan ministry made it difficult for them to keep on top of the many local variations. These variations were quite considerable: the calendar, rubrics, and offertory prayers, for example, were often different even from diocese to diocese. 

Fr Lang did, however, point out that this process of liturgical unification on the one hand went alongside a certain liturgical diversification on the other: the addition of new saints’ feasts, the proliferation of prefaces, tropes and sequences of uneven quality, and the multiplication of votive Masses were features of the period before Trent. By the time of the Protestant Reformation, the liturgical life of the Western Church, though not in a state of decay and decadence (as the picture is often painted), but it was confused and certain aspects were in need of reform. 

At the Council of Trent, the general consensus was that there ought to be a unified Breviary and Missal for the Western Church. In the event, the Council was not able to carry out this work itself, and the reforms were entrusted to the Pope, who set up a commission to carry them out. Fr Lang noted that there is almost no information about what this commission discussed, and no minutes of their meetings. However, we can look at the pre-Tridentine liturgical books to understand the 1570 Missal. It is possible to observe that the increased prominence of the simple form of Mass in these books meant that the ceremonial of the 1570 Missal was ultimately based on the Low Mass, rather than being a reduction of the Pontifical High Mass, and thus:

Consequently, in the post-Tridentine period, the gap widened between the “official” liturgy that was performed by the priest at the altar and the ways the laity found to participate in it.

The next paper was delivered by Bishop Alan Hopes, entitled Sing a New Song to the Lord: Towards a Revised Translation of the Liturgy of the Hours. Bishop Hopes started with the observation that the recent translation of the third edition of the Roman Missal brought into sharp focus the need for revised translations of those liturgical books that rely on the Missal to some extent - especially the Liturgy of the Hours. He outlined the progress made so far by ICEL and the various Bishops' Conferences involved, saying that it would likely be at least another four years before this project is finished.

The Bishop gave his opinion that there is much to be excited about in the work accomplished so far, notably the recovery of the hymnody of the Latin typical edition, the Liturgia Horarum. He noted that the draft translations of the office hymns do not rhyme, and that this translation decision means that they can be sung to chant or metrical tunes. Much of his talk was an examination of the principles and considerations of the upcoming revised translation: fidelity to the Latin text, nobility of expression, adaptability for singing and recitation, as well as bringing out the many scriptural and patristic allusions in the intercessions at Lauds and Vespers.

Currently, the Advent/Christmas volume is at the Grey Book stage (ICEL's final draft presented to the bishops), with the other volumes still at the Green Book stage (ICEL's initial draft). However, Bishop Hopes did give the conference the news that the Supplement to the Liturgy of the Hours, containing saints added since the last typical edition, is at the Grey Book stage and will most likely be available for use fairly soon. He also noted that the CDWDS is currently preparing an official two year cycle of readings for the Office of Readings (long talked about!), which will comprise a fifth volume of the Liturgia Horarum, and that this is intended to be included in the upcoming revision of the English books.

The fourth paper of the day was by Prof. Joris Geldhof, entitled Liturgy Beyond the Secular. Prof. Geldhof proposed that we ought to look at the relationship between liturgy and secularism differently. Rather than starting from primarily sociological observations, reconstructions of history or philosophical analyses of culture. he suggested that we start with the things that are at stake in the liturgy: the economy of salvation and the paschal mystery. Stated differently, instead of asking the question "what is the liturgy?", we should perhaps begin with "where/when is the liturgy?"

In Prof. Geldhof's view, the West has suffered from a certain prioritisation of knowledge, and while the quest for knowledge in the realm of liturgy is fine up to a point, space is also needed for the mystery of the liturgy. In today's secular world, the biggest problem we face in our evangelisation is indifferentism - in other words, the secular obstacles to belief are primarily moral and spiritual, rather than epistemic in nature. Liturgy needs to be rooted in mystery: it is where the mystery of redemption is reenacted, and it is when the Body of Christ is seen and the mystical body, the people of God, become what they are supposed to be.

One of Prof. Geldhof's main contentions was that liturgy requires us to hold a middle-ground between, on the one hand, the extreme secularism that would banish all faith and religion to the private sphere and, on the other hand, an extreme view of religion that completely shuns the world and the secular. Secularism is not identical with worldliness, and this means that Christians can be at home in secular society - but, however, they do not belong there!

The final paper of the day, "Especially in Mission Territories" (SC 38)? New Evangelisation and Liturgical (Reform of the) Reform was given by Dr Stephen Bullivant, who began by observing that the new evangelisation is not actually all that new. The "intermediate situation" between the mission ad gentes and pastoral care described by St John Paul II in Redemptoris Missio 33 as the "new evangelisation" or "re-evangelisation" can be seen even before the Second Vatican Council, in initiatives such as the French worker-priest movement in the 1940s. Dr Bullivant described how many of the reforms of Sacrosanctum Concilium were motivated by these neo-evangelistic considerations, "especially in mission territories" (cf. SC 38, 40.3, 65, 68, 119). 

The radical implementation of SC after the Council was in part caused, he suggested, by the Western world (i.e. Europe and North America) being considered "mission territory". Dr Bullivant gave the example of SC 119 on giving a suitable place in the liturgy to the musical traditions of mission lands, and noted that this paragraph was used as a justification for using folk, pop and rock music at Masses in the Western world to the near total abandonment of chant. And even in the face of the staggering lapsation rates of those Catholics who came of age during Vatican II and the immediate post-conciliar period, the folk and rock Masses persist to this day in more than a few places. It is difficult to see how the liturgical reforms after the Council succeeded in the aims expressed in the very first paragraph of SC, and in Dr Bullivant's view:

If it is the case - and prima facie, there are good grounds for thinking it is - that our liturgies often fail both "to impart an ever increasing vigour to the Christian life of the faithful" and "to strengthen whatever can help to call the whole of mankind into the household of the Church" (SC 1), then it is Sacrosanctum Concilium itself that demands that the reforms be reformed.

The day ended with a Solemn Mass in the usus antiquior celebrated by Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone, with the London Oratory Choir providing the music for the Mass.

(More photos and extracts from the talks can be found at the Sacra Liturgia Facebook page.)

Book Review: The Sacred Liturgy, Source and Summit of the Life and Mission of the Church

The Sacred Liturgy, Source and Summit of the Life and Mission of the Church. The Proceedings of the International Conference on the Sacred Liturgy – Sacra Liturgia 2013. Ed. Alcuin Reid. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2014. 446 pp.

Have you ever wished you could bring together a dream team of scholars, pastors, monks, liturgists, musicologists, all of them completely orthodox and totally committed to the sacred liturgy, and then have them commit to writing their finest insights, born of careful study, deep reflection, and pastoral experience? When I attended the Sacra Liturgia conference last summer in Rome (June 25–28, 2013), I found to my immense joy and profit that that was exactly what had been done by the conference’s organizers. The results are now in print for all the world to see, in the form of the complete proceedings of the conference, just published by Ignatius Press.

Publishers are aware that conference proceedings, like the genre of collected essays, are usually hard sells because readers tend to think: “Oh, this is just a random collection, and who can say whether the quality will be high across the board.” Fortunately, in this instance, we have a winner from cover to cover. I recently told a friend in charge of a library that this book is the most comprehensive, eloquent, insightful, hard-hitting, and refreshing volume on the liturgy that I have seen in the past ten years. It is a sheer pleasure to read most of the contents, and profitable to read all of it. The contributors are both clerical and lay, hailing from several continents, bringing their different cultural backgrounds, experiences, and professional expertise to bear on the most pressing (one is sometimes tempted to say intractable) questions of the liturgy in the Church today. These questions include sacred music, church architecture and furnishing, the ars celebrandi, the relationship of the old rite and the new evangelization, weaknesses or errors in the liturgical reform, liturgical formation and catechesis, the role and responsibility of the bishop, the meaning of “pastoral,” the Anglican contribution, the relationship between liturgy and social doctrine, and the canonical structure supporting liturgy.

It would be far too easy to turn this review into a lengthy summary of all the contents, which will be hardly necessary if, trusting my judgment, you get this book and read it yourself. But I cannot refrain from drawing attention to a few addresses that seemed to me particularly luminous and rousing when I heard them in Rome and that strike me as equally magnificent now that I am renewing my acquaintance with them in print.

Malcolm Cardinal Ranjith’s magisterial opening address, “The Sacred Liturgy, Source and Summit of the Life and Mission of the Church” (pp. 19–39) has the virtue of covering just about everything in a cosmic sweep that ranges from creation through Israel and the covenants to the Paschal Mystery of Christ, touching along the way such hot topics as the style of celebration, the use of Latin, the betrayal of the Fathers of the Council, and active participation.

Gabriel Steinschulte’s “Liturgical Music and the New Evangelization” (pp. 41–67) is an entertaining, perceptive, wide-ranging analysis of what has happened to church music and why, and the reasons behind the traditional stance of the Church on chant and polyphony. He sounds a theme that is taken up by several contributors, namely, how the new evangelization relies entirely on a sound, beautiful celebration of the sacred mysteries.

Bishop Peter J. Elliott, famed author of Ceremonies of the Modern Roman Rite, offers a reflection (pp. 69–85) on the principles of the ars celebrandi as applied to both the old and new forms of the Roman Rite, valuable reading for every celebrant and master of ceremonies. For those keen on liturgical arts, especially the design and arrangement of sacred buildings, the exquisite pieces by Fr. Stefan Heid and Fr. Uwe Michael Lang (pp. 87–114 and 187–211) provide ample nourishment. (My sole criticism of this book is the lack of the diagrams and photos that Fr. Heid and Fr. Lang shared with the conference in Rome to illustrate their arguments. But I do understand that adding a section of illustrations to this volume would have increased its bulk and price, and I also know that one can quickly find images on Google of most, if not all, of the things referred to by the authors; and fortunately, their arguments and descriptions are easy to follow.)

Tracey Rowland’s tour de force of theological anthropology, “The Usus Antiquior and the New Evangelization” (pp. 115–37) is required reading both for those who already know that the traditional Latin Mass is crucial to the Church’s mission in the contemporary world (these will gobble it up) and for those who suspect and worry that it might be so (these will come to a sobering realization and then start making plans for learning how to celebrate the EF). Here is a sample of Rowland’s vigorous style:

Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, Aidan Nichols and other lesser names have argued that the liturgy exists to worship God and that if we promote it for any other reason we are promoting sub-theological ideologies. The most common of these are liturgy as group therapy and liturgy as community building. Nonetheless, it is possible to hold that while the sole purpose of liturgy is worship, there are obvious spiritual and educational side effects and it is in this context that the usus antiquior can play an important role in the New Evangelisation. Specifically, the usus antiquior may be an antidote to the ruthless attacks on memory and tradition and high culture, typical of the culture of modernity, and it may also satisfy the desire of the post-modern generations to be embedded within a coherent, non-fragmented tradition that is open to the transcendent. (p. 117)

Alcuin Reid’s contribution, “Sacrosanctum Concilium and Liturgical Formation” (pp. 213–36) is, as we have all come to expect from him, brilliantly incisive and well-documented, as he demonstrates the central role given by the Council Fathers to a genuine immersion and formation in the “spirit and power of the liturgy” that would govern and control all reform and renewal. Sad to say, such a formation was utterly lacking, which is why the reform went sour and the renewal never happened. Reid urges us to take seriously the Council’s counsel by not neglecting ongoing liturgical formation in our own day, if we would ever surmount the difficulties in which we are mired.

Archbishop Alexander Sample’s “The Bishop: Governor, Promoter, and Guardian of the Liturgical Life of the Diocese” (pp. 255–71) created a stir at the conference for its comprehensiveness and clarity, bringing into one place all the most important conciliar and post-conciliar magisterial teachings on the precise role and responsibility of the bishop over the liturgy in his diocese—what he is obliged to do and what he should not do. His Excellency then makes a point of addressing Summorum Pontificum and its implications for the ministry of the bishop:

I would urge bishops to familiarize themselves with the usus antiquior as a means of achieving their own deeper formation in the liturgy and as a reliable reference point in bringing about renewal and reform of the liturgy in the local Church. Speaking from personal experience, my own study and celebration of the older liturgical rites has had a tremendous effect on my own appreciation of our liturgical tradition and has enhanced my own understanding and celebration of the new rites.
           I would further encourage bishops to be as generous as possible with the faithful who desire and ask for the opportunity to worship in the usus antiquior in their dioceses. Allowing for its natural flourishing will have its own effect on the liturgical life of the whole diocesan Church. It must never be seen as something out of the mainstream of ecclesial life, that is, as something on the fringes. The bishop’s own public celebration of it can prevent this from happening. (p. 270)

Complementary to this talk is Raymond Leo Cardinal Burke’s far-reaching, authoritative, and typically thorough “Liturgical Law in the Mission of the Church” (pp. 389–415), which refutes postconciliar antinomianism, establishes the right of God to receive due worship, and demonstrates how canon law supports this right and duty. It is worth mentioning, as a heartening "sign of the times," that among the 23 contributors to this volume are 4 cardinals, 4 bishops, 2 ordinaries, and 2 abbots. We are, thanks be to God, well past those dark days when the liturgical movement had nearly no hierarchical support or public profile.

For me personally, the talk that hit me in the gut and left me speechless was Msgr. Ignacio Barreiro Carámbula’s “Sacred Liturgy and the Defense of Human Life” (pp. 371–88). With incomparable candor, detail, and theological acumen, Msgr. Barreiro exposes the relationship between the ravaging of liturgical tradition and the destruction of the family, and how the lack of reverence towards God, especially as present in the mystery of the Mass and the Most Holy Eucharist, has trickled down into contempt for the unborn. His address held no less power for me when I re-read it in the book. An excerpt:

Recently Bishop Athanasius Schneider reminded us that the worst sin that humanity can commit is to refuse to adore God, to refuse to give Him the first place, the place of honor. A man that does not adore God in the liturgy will not value the main gift of God, which is life. A secularized man that considers himself autonomous will be uncomfortable that the tabernacle would be at the center of the Church or that the cross should be at the center of the altar.
          Secularization rejects the right relation of man with God. Secularization denies our dependence from God, so it refutes Him as giver of life and that man by his nature is a being that adores, giving due worship to God. We are all sensitive to the justice that is due to our neighbor, but the precedence should be given to the justice that is due to God. Catholicism has to be understood as a society of men who give to God the right worship and as a consequence they provide service to their fellow men. Service [to the neighbor] should not have priority, instead service should be the consequence of worship. In some ways we can say that service is a continuation that flows from worship. (p. 372)

The contributions from Fr. Nicola Bux, Fr. Andrew Burnham, Fr. Guido Rodheudt, and Fr. Paul Gunter are also noteworthy, but having said that, I want to reiterate that, surprisingly, there is no weak link in this lengthy chain: all 21 papers in this book are worth reading and re-reading carefully. Indeed, I predict that whoever gets this book and dips into it will either start photocopying pages from it for his friends (and perhaps also his enemies), or will buy more copies and give them away as gifts. Our profound gratitude is owed to all the conference speakers who, by means of this superb collection, now share their work with a worldwide audience.

In conclusion, I am willing to say, without the slightest hyperbole, that this book can serve as a kind of charter for the new liturgical movement—and I hope it shall do so.